"Don't you think you're being disrespectful, Miss?" said another passerby on his way through the park. Like the last twenty people who'd commented, I made no response. This was art, after all, not protest. I wasn't trying to spark dialogue, but rather to spark thinking. This was a statement.
And what a statement! I did most of my performance art here in Arthur Park. It got a lot of foot traffic, which was the main appeal, and it had the fringe benefit of being a stone's throw from home. Today, that foot traffic was being treated to a display I called, "The Conquering Father."
Rev. Josiah Burns was the town founder, and according to local legend, it had been he who'd decided to found the settlement in what was then a vast forest. "I'll clear this woods with a Bible in one hand and an axe in the other," he was quoted as saying. His statue was right here in Arthur Park, a massive foot propped up on an actual stump, that quote engraved on a plaque set into the ground nearby. The conventional thinking of my unquestioning co-citizens was that he was a hero, a pioneer Man's Man who'd tamed the wilderness with the lights of the church and civilization.
I was flipping the script.
Visitors to Arthur Park today would be treated to a slightly different take on Josiah Burns. Gone was the wooden stump that supported his upraised foot. In its place was yours truly. Laying on my side with his foot planted on my upward-facing arm, his mighty bronze boot was planted on me instead. For my part, I was clad in a custom-made set of clothing I'd designed myself. (I'd triple-majored in art history, political science, and fashion design. It had been a brutal eight years and had cost my dad a fortune, but here I was, the perfect instrument of social justice.) The "outfit" had begun as a canvas featuring a blue-and-green pattern showing the continents on the planet earth. I'd taken it in some, filled the suit with some padding, and with the use of a little hair dye, fake blood, and face paint...
Today, the Rev. Josiah Burns stood atop a mutilated, dessicated, dead Mother Earth. An uncomfortable pouch of fake blood was resting inside my mouth, and I'd practiced using my tongue to manipulate the release to let some out. I'd gotten here shortly after sunup, scattering several bags of sand, hundreds of dried out old sticks, and, of course, the pièce de résistance: more than two dozen disturbingly realistic-looking imitation animal carcasses. I'd been working on them for weeks, hitting up taxidermists, hunting lodges, and even a few dog toys I thought looked close enough for the park. Add in a copious amount of fake blood and voila!
Art.
As for my most recent heckler, I didn't respond. Talk back and you're having a conversation, and then the art becomes both of us. Which is to say it becomes me and my carefully planned statement, along with the blubberings of Jocko the Village Idiot. I'd learned that from my dad, from years of lectures about how I ought to do something productive like get an MBA or find a nice husband. There was nothing that frightened him more than the thought of having his only daughter wind up another starving artist. Except to accept his money, I ignored him. He didn't hear me, so I wouldn't listen to him.
After all, there was scarcely a man alive who could see a young woman expressing herself without having to interject and try to make it all about them. I pitied them even more than I raged against them. The patriarchy had made them into these slobbering, hairy brutes, devastating their planet, their relationships, their own bodies. Still, although I make it a point not to quote men - as if they need another mouthpiece! - John Lennon once summarized eloquently what women were in this world, and I had to look out for my own kind.
The man passed. Inevitably, others followed, and I made no response to them either, staring ahead with the vacant dead eyes of the planet men like Josiah Burns had helped murder in the name of the manocracy. (A little more fake blood dribbling from the eye socket helped drive the point home.) I lie there, listening to passersby.
"That's tasteless," said an old man struggling through his daily walk.
"Oh god, are those animals real? No, I guess not. Still, that's..." said a woman with a shudder before pushing her stroller on down the sidewalk.
"Is this chick, like, actually dead or something?" said some idiot stoner after snapping his fingers in my face a few times. His moron friend laughed at the "super fucked-up" display as they went on their way.
"This looks like defacement of public property," said one jerk in a business suit. It wasn't, as I of course had obtained a permit; still, his assumption bothered him so little he almost stepped on a blood-drenched fake squirrel.
"I'll rape this earth with my false god in one hand, and my phallus in the other," read another man, making a face. (The permit hadn't included the replica plaque I'd placed over the one displaying the undoubtedly spurious Burns quote, but I doubted most would look that closely.)
This last man, however, didn't simply keep on walking. He looked around the area, seeming to take it all in. Inwardly, I was hopeful. While the male gaze wasn't what this or any of my art was designed for, maybe I could reach this man, show him some small portion of the iniquities of his ilk.
"This is pretty clever. You laid the blood on pretty thick, granted, but you stayed on message, and the message is rich and complex but still clear." He didn't even know about the thick pool of blood my suit was concealing. That would only be visible once I stood up. The man knelt down in front of me; through practice, I maintained my gaze on the same point in the distance. "What's your name?"
I didn't respond. For a guy who'd just said how clear my art was, he sure seemed obtuse. "Right, not talking. Do you have a card or anything? My neighbor's birthday's coming up, and I wondered if you did kid's parties."
His mockery engendered no more response than his introduction. "That was a joke, of course. Well, fair enough. I'm always impressed by how well some of you artsy types can stay focused on your craft, even amidst distraction. I bet I can throw you off, though."
At that, my eyes darted to him, conveying all the menace I could put in them. If this guy so much as touched me, he'd learn the hard way about the stun gun I had concealed under a fold of my suit. He held his hands up in mock surrender. "Whoa, easy there. I'm not gonna touch you or anything. Relax."
I gave him the hard look a moment longer, then went back to my dead-eyed vigil at nothingness. "Here, let me just..." The man produced a little pendant from his pocket, and began swinging it in front of my eyes.
It was, in fact, pretty distracting. It looked cheap, probably not even glass but mere plastic, yet it still caught the light enchantingly. It took all my concentration to look through it. I could hear the sound of his voice talking, but I didn't catch words. I was focused 100% on my craft, and I wasn't going to let some jerk distract me by dangling shinies in front of my eyes.
Instead of listening to this stranger droning on, I thought about my art. Here I was, bloody and surrounded by visceral carnage. Was it reaching people? Maybe. Still, mostly the effect seemed to be to turn people away. What I really needed was some way to draw people in. But how? People only seemed to respond to shock value, but how could I shock them without simultaneously losing them? I had to find something both shocking and grabby. Something that got people's attention, but also didn't then repel it right back away. What was something people
liked
to look at?
Well, there was that... But no. I couldn't use
that
.
